Reported to be China's longest-surviving AIDS patient, 40-year-old Meng Lin -- who uses apseudonym -- can be seen as an expert on changing public attitude toward the deadly disease.

"The general situation is improving, encouraging more HIV carriers to step out of the shadows and join the national campaignto curb the spread of AIDS," said Meng.

He sounded hoarse and tired, a situation that the founder of the "Ark of Love," an organization for HIV carriers, explained wasdue to a busy schedule ahead of the annual World AIDS Day.

Meng's tone turned bitter when asked about the stigma of the disease.

One story he told was about a woman who goes by the pseudonym of Xiao Hong, who went to a renowned hospital in Beijing earlier this year for a kidney disorder.

The unidentified hospital suggested surgery, but when it learned that Xiao was an HIV carrier, it turned her down. She tried two other hospitals, both of which also rejected her.

Her husband, who was also HIV-infected, became so angry that heaven considered committing suicide in public as a protest. Xiao said bitterly that she wished the doctors themselves would be infected.

Persisting stigma

In China, the first group of AIDS patients were mostly poor farmers, who got infected with the HIV virus when they sold blood to unlicensed operators, dubbed "blood heads," in the early 1990s.

The "blood heads" had a deadly practice: they pooled all the donated blood, spun it through a centrifuge to separate the plasma,then pumped the residue back into the donors' bodies in the belief that the practice was safe -- and cheap.

Since it can take a decade for an HIV infection to cause symptoms, it was years before most of the infected learned of their fate. They spread the infection to their families, either through sexual contact or by mother-to-child transmission to unborn children.

People in China didn't and often still don't know what type of contact does or doesn't spread HIV and so prejudice persists, even though overt discrimination against HIV carriers was outlawed in China 10 years ago.

A report in September by UNAIDS, which polled some 6,000 students, white- and blue-collar workers and migrant workers, found that more than two-thirds wouldn't live in the same household with an HIV carrier and nearly half were reluctant to eat with such people.

The study found that 48 percent of the interviewees still believe that a mosquito bite can transmit HIV, while 18 percent thought they could contract HIV by having an infected person sneeze or cough on them.

The other cause of stigma is bias. People, and on many occasions the media, associate HIV primarily with frowned-upon activities such as intravenous drug use, prostitution or homosexuality.

The UNAIDS report shows that more than 30 percent of the interviewees from six cities in China thought people with HIV/AIDS deserved the disease because of their sexual or drug-related conduct.